The Huffington Post Hates Physics. And Economics. Oh, and America.

When you are filling up this Labor Day Weekend, if the temperature is
more than 60 degrees, you are getting ripped off by about three cents
per gallon in one of America's most longest-standing, outrageous
ripoffs. That's roughly $2.3 billion per year.

Oh dear. "Most longest-standing." What's the problem?

Well, it's that—as you may remember from some course
you took—matter expands when it gets warmer. As you may
also remember, "matter" includes, specifically,
gasoline. According to this NIST
document, gasoline expands
by a factor of 0.00069 for each increased degree Fahrenheit.
When (say) you pump a given volume of
75-degree fuel, you're getting about 1% fewer
gasoline molecules than you would at 60 degrees. (Conversely, when you
pump 45-degree fuel, you're getting about 1% more.)

It takes a guy like Jamie, however, to look at this physics and detect
a Big Oil Conspiracy.
"US fuel pumps do not adjust for temperature,
unlike their Canadian counterparts," he intones ominously. (Why does he
specify 60 degrees as the point at which the
outrageous ripoff begins? Because the American Petroleum
Institute set that long ago
as a standard temperature for measuring the
density of petroleum products. It's an arbitrary temperature, picked for
convenience, but Jamie
thinks it's been handed down by the fossil-fuel gods, or something.)

What Jamie glosses over:
this is a matter of regulation. Gas stations price by actual delivered
volume because
they are required by your local state government to measure fuel that
way,
with pumps regularly inspected for accuracy to
make sure they're measuring that, and nothing else.
State and federal taxes are also levied against actual
delivered volume. (Aha! The government benefits from the "ripoff"
too!)

So? That could easily change. For example, since Jamie thinks that
varying-density gasolines should not have the same price, a
workaround would be to charge by weight instead. End of "ripoff."

But that's hardly
the only way to do it. We could charge by
the Joule: how much energy would be released by the gasoline you're
pumping?
Or—here's one Al Gore could get behind—we could
force stations to
charge per carbon atom, since a lot of those will wind up in the air
floating around as CO2.

But the key point is, despite Jamie's outrage, none of this really
matters.
Obviously there would be some major administrative and
infrastructure costs in switching over to a new pricing scheme for
gasoline, but after that, consumers would be paying …about the
same as they would have anyway. Because gasoline prices are set by
supply and demand, not by tweaks to the pricing scheme.
If Jamie's desired "adjustment" happened, we wouldn't
suddenly and magically save the $2.3 billion he trumpets; how could that
even begin to be true?

Jamie's unstated
assumption
is that there's some number Out There, which is
the True Price for gasoline. And—obviously!—if you're paying
more than the True Price, you're being ripped off! That's economic
illiteracy, but the Huffington Post doesn't care.

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